Friday ~ 12 June, 8:00 AM US Eastern / 10:00 PM Australian Eastern
DESCRIPTION: This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Janette Turner Hospital’s novel Oyster, arguably her finest work written at the height of her prominence. A Queenslander who became a distinctly transnational writer, Hospital was, throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, an important participant at writers’ festivals, attracting significant critical acclaim in both Australia and North America. Though often overshadowed by contemporaries such as Malouf and Carey, Hospital’s later-career disappearance from literary criticism has been acute. Since 2000, she has published two short story collections and three novels, yet these works have received comparatively little attention. A transnational postmodern writer who moved between Queensland and South Carolina—and everywhere between—her interests in borders, South and North relations, dislocations, rainforests and ecology remain current and worthy of critical attention. Although she lived and worked in the United States, Hospital remained conversant with the Australian tradition. Indeed, the title Oyster appears to allude to Patrick White’s Voss, in which the character Le Musurier (modelled on Rimbaud) remarks that he feels gathering within him something of great beauty: ‘This I call my oyster delusion.’ This roundtable proposes to uncover as yet undiscovered pearls in her fiction, recovering Janette Turner Hospital for the 21st century.
PARTICIPANTS
Geoff Rodoreda
Russell West-Pavlov
Nicholas Birns
Victoria Circelli
Samuel Cox